American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  And four thousand troops did not necessarily mean four thousand effectives ready to take the field. It had been a hard winter on everyone. Many of Gage’s troops had been sick, and some had died. Samuel Adams believed that others had deserted; in addition, he wrote, “many I believe intend to desert” come spring. Adams estimated in early March that there were not more than 2,200 effective men under Gage’s command. Adams told a correspondent, “I have seen a true List of the 65th & the Detachment of Royal Irish, in both of which there are only 167 of whom 102 are effective.”16

  This situation did not, however, keep most British officers from looking with disdain upon their colonial opponents. In fact, from General Gage on down, the greatest weakness of the British army might have been their underestimation of the rebels at every turn. “It is a curious Masquerade Scene,” one British officer wrote after observing Boston militia at drill, “to see grave sober Citizens, Barbers and Tailors, who never looked fierce before in their Lives, but at their wives, Children, or Apprentices, strutting about in their Sunday wigs in stiff Buckles with their Muskets on their Shoulders, struggling to put on a Martial Countenance.”17

  When a member of the House of Lords dared to suggest “the impracticability of conquering America,” the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, responded that he did not “think the noble Lord can be serious on this matter.” So what if the colonies abound in men? Sandwich asked. “They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men… [and] believe me my lords, the very sound of a cannon would carry them off.”18

  Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines held similar opinions and was not afraid to put them in writing to Sandwich. He had arrived in Boston the previous November as part of a six-hundred-man force of marines. “I often wish to have orders to march to Cambridge,” Pitcairn wrote Sandwich in February of 1775, “and seize those impudent rascals that have the assurance to make such resolves.” Pitcairn acknowledged that he had “no orders to do what I wish to do, and what I think may easily be done,” which was to seize all the troublemakers and “send them to England.”19

  Two days before the Boston Massacre commemoration, Pitcairn wrote again to the Earl of Sandwich and noted that General Gage had met with “some of the Great Wigs, as they are called here,” and swore to them that “if there was a single man of the King’s troops killed in any of their towns [General Gage] would burn it to the ground.” Whether Gage meant it, or whether the words made any impression on the local leaders, is debatable, but they did make for impressive rhetoric when repeated among Gage’s junior officers. Indeed, Pitcairn remained “satisfied that one active campaign, a smart action, and burning of two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.” Nothing less, Pitcairn firmly believed, “will ever convince those foolish bad people that England is in earnest.”20

  AS THE BRITISH OCCUPIERS OF Boston looked down their noses at their rebel adversaries, Samuel Adams, under the auspices of the Boston committee charged with receiving and distributing donations, continued to crank out letters of thanks for the material support that other colonies were sending to Boston. He was always sure to include with his thanks exhortations to the greater collective cause. From the county and borough of Norfolk and the town of Portsmouth, both in Virginia, came “seven hundred and fifteen bushels corn, thirty-three barrels pork, fifty-eight barrels bread, and ten barrels flour.” Unfortunately, the ship carrying these provisions floundered, but not before the Boston men had “the good fortune of saving the most part of the cargo.”21

  From Henrico County, surrounding Richmond, Virginia, came “three hundred twenty-nine and a half bushels wheat, one hundred thirty-five bushels corn, and twenty-three barrels flour.” In hindsight, Adams’s thank you carried some irony with it. “Having been born to be free,” Adams assured the Virginians of his fellow Bostonians, “they will never disgrace themselves by a submission to the injurious terms of slavery.”22 The skin color and legal status of the laboring hands that had grown that Virginia produce in the first place was not acknowledged as part of the communication.

  Such generosity from other colonies was not lost on loyalists who despised the show of support and hoped that Boston might suffer more. “In God’s name,” asked loyalist writer and Anglican clergyman Samuel Seabury, “are not the people of Boston able to relieve their own poor? Must they go begging… from Nova-Scotia to Georgia, to support a few poor people, whom their perverseness and ill conduct have thrown into distress?”23

  But such donations were not always without controversy. When the schooner Dunmore brought a cargo of “valuable donations from our friends in Virginia,” Adams responded with the usual thanks, but added a warning that a recently built vessel had lately sailed from Boston to Virginia under a master named Crowel Hatch. Rebel tradesmen in Boston, feeling the economic downturn resulting from the closure of the port, had proposed to Hatch that they do the construction at a 5 percent discount. Refusing to work with rebels, Hatch demurred, got his ship built by “more ordinary workmen from the country,” and then, according to Adams, “proposed that the Committee should employ our smith, in making anchors for his vessel, at a price by which they could get nothing but their labor for their pains.”

  When the rebel blacksmiths declined to work without a profit, Hatch, in Adams’s words, grew very angry and threatened repeatedly “that he would stop all the donations he could, and that no more should come from the place where he was going to, meaning Virginia.” Adams closed this letter by asking the Virginians “to use your influence that Capt. Hatch may not have it in his power, (if he should be disposed,) to traduce the Committee and injure the sufferers in this Town, for whose relief our friends in Virginia have so generously contributed.”24

  These donations to beleaguered Boston from throughout the colonies were the surest signs yet that Massachusetts was not standing alone. Other letters in the Boston press went to great lengths to emphasize this. “We have the Pleasure to inform you,” a correspondent identified only as “a Gentleman in South Carolina” wrote, “that in this Colony the [Continental] Association takes Place as effectually as Law itself.” Vessels from England had been obliged to return with their merchandise unloaded, he claimed, and Bostonians were assured of the “fixed Determination” of their southern cousins to adhere to the trade restrictions.25

  The number of similar anonymous letters appearing in colonial newspapers raises at least some question as to their veracity. It is not unthinkable that rebels, particularly the politically savvy and media-conscious Samuel Adams, desperately trying to rally the spirits of occupied Boston, might have occasionally fabricated some good news of solidarity and support with letters from “a Gentleman” somewhere.

  On a more personal note, Samuel Adams also wrote to Arthur Lee, who was a trade representative in London and a brother in the famous clan of Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee, both of whom would later sign the Declaration of Independence. Adams told Lee that he understood the reluctance of many in England to risk support for the colonies “lest we should desert our selves” and give up the fight. “But assure them,” Adams continued, that “the people hold the Invasion of their Rights & Liberties the most horrid rebellion and a Neglect to defend them against any Power whatsoever the highest Treason.”26

  ONE OF GENERAL GAGE’S CHIEF lieutenants in this “Invasion of their Rights & Liberties” was Hugh Percy. In many respects, Percy epitomized all that most colonials with rebel leanings despised about the English ruling class, which largely resolved as a matter of right to be lord and master over them. Percy was the oldest son of Sir Hugh Smithson, who in 1766 became the first Duke of Northumberland. Thereafter, his son Hugh was known as Lord Percy or Earl Percy. Educated at Eton and St. John’s College, Cambridge, before he turned eighteen, Lord Percy then received a commission in the army. With his father’s influence, he rose rapidly to become a lieutenant colonel in a newly raised regiment of foot by the time he was twenty, in 1762. The following year, and again in 1768, Percy was elected uno
pposed as a member of Parliament, where he voted against the repeal of the Stamp Act. By December of 1768, he was appointed colonel of the Fifth Regiment of Foot, distinguished by its natty gosling-green facings, and in May of 1774 he departed with his regiment for service in occupied Boston.

  Percy had a large, hooked nose that looked like the beak of a hawk, and he immediately came to view the rebel faction as appropriate prey. While praising Gage for his “great coolness & firmness,” Percy found the populace in general to be rash and timid. “To hear them talk,” he wrote his father soon after his arrival in Boston, “you would imagine that they would attack us & demolish us every night; & yet, whenever we appear, they are frightened out of their wits.”27

  On his infrequent trips outside Boston, Percy found the surrounding countryside to be “the most beautiful country I ever saw in my life,” but bemoaned the people as just the opposite. “The people here,” he told his second cousin, “are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascalls, cruel, & cowards. I must own I cannot but despise them compleately.”28

  As his time in Boston wore on, Percy was careful not to criticize Gage directly, but he did tell his father, “The general’s great lenity and moderation serve only to make them more daring & insolent.… He has given them every proof that his utmost wish is to restore peace & tranquillity without coming to violent measures.” His father’s response was to obtain an order permitting General Gage to send his son home to England, but the thirty-two-year-old colonel felt it his duty to remain with his regiment.29

  As the winter of 1774–75 wore on, Percy shared the anxiety of the “strange unsettled state” in Boston. By February, six months after his landing, disease had caused the deaths of two officers and 123 men, women, and children of the various regiments.30 Percy put the best possible spin on it when he wrote a mentor and member of Parliament that the rebel leaders “undoubtedly grow more desperate as they see less hopes of escaping, and do all they can to drive the others to extremities.”

  Meanwhile, Percy said, the British troops were “waiting with impatience the determinations and orders from yr side of the water.” That was undoubtedly true from General Gage down to the lowliest private. But Percy couldn’t refrain from letting his mounting frustrations show. Rather pointedly, he told the MP that whatever actions Parliament took, “I hope they will be pointed and effectual ones; for you left so many loopholes in the last acts you passed, that it was found not possible to enforce them.”31

  Percy told his father much the same thing and foreshadowed the conclusions that Lord North’s government was reaching in London. Gage might well wish to be lenient and hope for some accommodation that would stem the irrepressible tide toward open warfare, but the choices were becoming increasingly black and white. “If Gt Britain relaxes in the least,” wrote Percy, “adieu to the colonies. They will be lost forever.”32

  Chapter 7

  Independence or Reconciliation?

  Even as Bostonians sat on the hot seat, no one but the most ardent of rebels was yet talking openly about inevitable independence from Great Britain. Loyalist Daniel Leonard, writing as Massachusettensis, found such a thought deplorable. “It is our highest interest to continue a part of the British empire,” Massachusettensis lectured, “and equally our duty to remain subject to the authority of parliament.”

  John Adams quoted this line in his rejoinder—addressing Massachusettensis as “our rhetorical magician”—and was quick to mention the prospect of the roles being reversed. “We are a part of the British dominions… and it is our interest and duty to continue so,” Novanglus acknowledged, but the time might not be far off “when the colonies may have the balance of numbers and wealth in [their] favour.” If that happened and the colonies should then in turn attempt to rule Great Britain “by an American parliament, without an adequate representation in it,” Novanglus predicted Great Britain would “infallibly resist us by her arms.”1

  But it was American arms that were on the minds of some two hundred delegates to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress when it convened in Concord on March 22 for another session. Two days later, under the hand of John Hancock, its newly elected president, the congress voted to continue “most vigorously” the defensive measures recommended by the prior session because “any Relaxation would be attended with the utmost Danger to the Liberties of this Colony and all of America.”2

  Similar preparations were being undertaken throughout the colonies. In Richmond, Virginia, the House of Burgesses reconvened in a church after the royal governor dissolved its official proceedings in the capital at Williamsburg. Delegate George Washington wrote to his brother John Augustine Washington, thanking him “for the holly berries and cotton-seed” and expressing pleasure over John’s “laudable pursuit” in training an independent company of militia. George had already promised to review the Richmond militia company, of which he had been offered command, sometime during the coming summer. He told his brother that he could at the same time “review yours, and shall very cheerfully accept the honor of commanding it, if occasion require it to be drawn out, as it is my full intention to devote my life and fortune in the cause we are engaged in.”3 Surely George Washington must have sensed that the coming summer would bring much more action than military reviews.

  As the Virginia legislature convened, one of its first acts was to ratify the nonimportation and nonconsumption measures of the First Continental Congress—the “American Continental Congress,” as its proceedings reported with emphasis—and thank Virginia’s loyal delegates to the same. Then it was Patrick Henry’s turn to speak to the military needs of the colony. Henry introduced a resolution on the tactical concerns of military preparation that was closely modeled on a resolution that had been passed by a Fairfax County convention chaired by George Washington. Henry’s strategy was clear. If the Virginia assembly, illegally convened though it was in the eyes of the king, chose to act on a plan of military preparedness, it would be following the same path as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and establishing a de facto provincial government independent of Great Britain.

  Debate on the resolution was heated and certainly not one-sided. Finally, Henry rose to defend his motion with words that held the attention of all assembled. To those who claimed that the resolution went too far, Henry asserted that events had already taken them that far down that road and more. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace,” Henry proclaimed, “but there is no peace,” and any day might bring word of “the clash of resounding arms” from Boston. War was inevitable, Henry maintained. “Let it come,” he intoned, “let it come.” Then he dramatically flung his arms apart and pronounced the words for which he would best be remembered. “I know not what course others may take,” he told the assembly, “but as for me—give me liberty or give me death.”

  Dead silence followed for a moment or two, as the gravity of Henry’s words took hold. Then, after another round of spirited debate, the moderates were voted down by five votes, and Patrick Henry was named chairman of a committee authorized to produce a colony-wide militia plan. Among those on his committee were George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson.4

  THE DAY BEFORE PATRICK HENRY’S speech, Edmund Burke, one of the most distinguished orators, authors, and political theorists in England, rose to speak in the House of Commons. Ingrained though he was in the British system, Burke was a native of Ireland, and that island’s experience with British rule may well have colored his thinking on the crisis in America. Burke was decidedly opposed to Lord North’s unrelenting policies of coercion rather than conciliation toward the American colonies.

  This was hardly Burke’s first time speaking out against such policies. Almost a year before, in the heat of the debate over the restrictions placed on Massachusetts by the Intolerable Acts, Burke argued against the effectiveness of such punitive measures, particularly that of bringing accused insurgents to trial in England. “If you govern America at all, Sir,” Burke told the House of Commons, “it must be by an
army… they never will consent without force being used.”5

  On that occasion, Lord North rose in rebuttal to say that while he did not profess to know the proper time “to lay a fresh tax on America,” he did know “this is not the proper time to repeal one.” But then North underscored the secondary status that many in his government accorded the Americans. “I will answer,” North went on with the haughty tone of an overly strict and superior parent, “that when they are quiet, and have a respect for their mother country, the mother country will be good-natured to them.”6

  Whatever his strengths in other matters, Lord North had two personal drawbacks when it came to finding a peaceful resolution of the looming crisis in America. First, North was intensely, perhaps blindly, loyal to George III, and second, he was haughtily contemptuous of colonials in America, particularly those who opposed his policies. One should never allow contempt to color an appraisal of one’s enemies, and Lord North made this error repeatedly in his dealings with North America.

  While Edmund Burke, former prime minister William Pitt, and others championed the cause of English liberty and sought to apply it evenly across the empire, a solid majority in Parliament supported Lord North’s views. Samuel Adams and others in the colonies had long hoped that the House of Commons would “be purgd at the next Election,” but that election, late in 1774, had only swelled the ranks of North’s Tories. Adams previously thought it “best that the Tories in their house have acted without Disguise,” but their actions did not as yet find disfavor among the majority of the British electorate.7 By the time the results of America’s renewed nonimportation and nonconsumption measures were felt on British merchants and manufacturers, North’s majority was safely ensconced for another seven-year term.